Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran speaks with CNBC during the Invest i America Forum on Oct. 15, 2025.
CNBC
Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran entered with big ideas about how the central bank should change— radically so, in some cases. As he prepares to step down in the coming days from what will have been the shortest tenure as a governor in 71 years, he appears convinced his ideas are right.
But in a CNBC interview, Miran, 42, made clear that the reality of working at the Fed has tempered his views about how fast those changes can be made. Change is slower than he envisioned.
The Fed is “really a committee,” Miran said. “It’s different than an agency where there’s a very clear executive who just runs the show, and what he or she says goes, and if you don’t like it, you’re out.”
That observation is important for two reasons: First, Miran could return as a governor, potentially before the end of President Donald Trump’s term. Second, incoming Chair Kevin Warsh shares some of Miran’s big ideas.
Warsh was confirmed as the next chair on Wednesday and will take the board seat Miran is vacating. The two won’t overlap.
But Warsh will be forced to reckon with the reality Miran has encountered: a Federal Reserve full of people with their own economic ideas and where institutional change is often glacial.
“You’ve got to convince people,” said Miran, who took his seat in September 2025, filling a position vacated by Adriana Kugler.
Miran said the Fed’s policymakers and staff treated his ideas with an open mind, despite sharp criticisms from outside the building that he represented a threat to Fed independence.
He initially chose not to resign his position as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Trump while serving at the Fed. He described that as aimed at saving himself the trouble of what could have been a third Senate confirmation in a brief span, but the decision landed poorly amid Trump’s campaign to undermine Powell.
Miran resigned the White House position in February and has no immediate plans to return.
He argues his critics have it backward. He was valuable to the president because he looked at the economic evidence and concluded that interest rates were too high. “I’ve laid out my math,” he said. “I’ve always done what I think is right.”
Miran will end his tenure on the Fed with a rare record of dissenting at every one of the six Fed meetings he attended. That lines up with Trump’s demands for sharply lower interest rates. Even when the Fed cut rates, Miran dissented in favor of larger cuts.
Holding fast
As he exits the Fed, Miran has not much altered his views that rates can and should be much lower.
“If I were writing down dots today, I might have one fewer cut than I did in the last summary of economic projections,” he said. That “dot” on the Fed’s grid of individual members’ rate expectations called for a full percentage point, or 100 basis points, of cuts this year, or three more quarter-point cuts than the median of his colleagues on the Fed.
Miran says he would eliminate just one quarter-point cut now — in other words, calling for rates to be three-quarters of a point lower — because of the cuts the Fed has made already and because “the data has made me a little bit more concerned about inflation.” But he adds, “I still think it’s important to frontload those cuts, because I still don’t think that we should be exerting restraints in the labor market.”
Miran’s push for cuts is based on several other factors, many of them the result of administration policies that he believes will drive down inflation and allow the Fed to run the economy with lower rates.
First is his belief in the positive impact the administration’s deregulation will have on the economy.
“I think that regulations are still underappreciated in terms of how determinative they are for the supply side,” he said. “Saying you’re not allowed to build versus you are allowed to build is night and day … Deregulation pushes up the supply side by allowing producers to produce more with less is disinflationary.”
He estimates deregulation could lop a half a point of future inflation rates, even while he acknowledges the uncertainty created by tariff inflation could hold back some of those gains.
Convincing colleagues
While some of his colleagues still want to take their time studying the concept before incorporating it into policy, he believes he’s made a few converts. “I still think it’s more important than everyone else does, but they’re a lot closer to my view now than they were in September,” he said.
Those colleagues have likely not heard the last word on the potential benefits of deregulation. Fed Chair designee Warsh has called Trump’s deregulatory plans “the most significant since President Ronald Reagan’s.”
Miran’s views on the veracity of the inflation data are another key plank in his arguments for lower rates. In a forthcoming paper, Miran will argue along with two Fed economists that recent software inflation has been artificially inflated by technical factors, distorting headline and core numbers.
Perhaps the most significant of Miran’s ideas is his approach to how he believes a central bank should think about the appropriate policy response to a surge in inflation for a supply shock, such as soaring oil prices now. He says it takes roughly 12 months to 18 months for changes in Fed policy to affect the economy. That sets limits on the kind of price changes that the Fed should be concerned about today, he says.
Consider a clothing company that has had to bump up prices to account for the cost of tariffs, Miran said.
“If you think that a higher tariff is going to boost clothing prices today, there’s nothing you can do about that with monetary policy,” Miran said. The same goes for Iran war’s oil shock, he said. It may push up individual prices today, but the kind of inflation the Fed should care about is an ongoing, upward trend in prices, not one-off events.
“That’s the thing with supply shocks, is that you need to be forecasting more supply shocks,” he said.
The Warsh view
A concern with Miran’s approach is that, if the Fed keeps looking through supply shocks, markets and the public will doubt its inflation-fighting credibility.
It isn’t clear Miran if has persuaded his fellow Fed members to come around to his view. Three dissenters at the most recent meeting said they were worried about inflation.
But they will soon find a louder voice making the same argument around the boardroom table.
Warsh shares Miran’s view that the Fed has gotten tripped in over analyzing micro-level prices, Warsh said at his April 21 confirmation hearing.
“I’m most interested in what’s the underlying inflation rate, not what’s the one time change in prices because of a change in geopolitics or change in beef, but what’s the underlying generalized change in prices in the economy?” he said.
It seems likely Miran will remain an active participant in the Fed debate even after he leaves. He wrote often on monetary policy before he joined the Fed and worked on his research paper on software inflation into the last weeks of his short term.
“I’d love to be back,” Miran said. “But it’s not up to me.” The White House declined to comment on whether Trump is considering it.
Outgoing Chair Jerome Powell has said he will retain his governor’s seat at least until an investigation into renovations at the Fed’s headquarters is completed. Though Powell has not put an end date on when he will leave, and his term runs until January 2028, an early exit would open a board seat.
Were he to return, it would be consequential for Warsh, whom, as Miran has found, will need allies around the table at the Fed.
